An (Elixir+Nerves)-powered Cloud ☁️ (1/2)

elixir nerves hardware IoT

Nov 23 2023

My friends from the digital art collective lab212 asked me to work on the software part of their latest art installation, ombres blanches. It features an electromagnetic ambiant background sensor developed by Exem, a french environmental research lab.

The cloud, during a local minimum relatively to time-boxed averages of the EM field.

Based on the level of ambient EM waves, we control a high-pressure industrial pump via pulse-width modulation, re-routing the water flow either to a reservoir or to high-precision nozzles generating a high-quality, realistic cloud.

The cloud, growing as EM field intensity rises.

The cloud is controlled by a Nerves app, that gives us a private Liveview control panel to fine-tune the reactivity parameters and persist them.

Sneak peek on the control panel of the reactivity parameters.

We will then make it ready for production use (meaning, able to be shipped as a whole plug-ang-play crate to an exhibition venue) and reveal the technical details after the first show :-) .